The Legend of Rooney's Ring review – mythical Wayne and Coleen bust-up becomes mythically silly panto

The Guardian

7 hours ago

Sometimes fake news can be fun. Take the time word went around Liverpool that a furious Coleen McLoughlin had taken off Wayne Rooney's engagement ring and thrown it into a bush. The city's detectorists came out in force.
Things got so out of hand that the National Trust had to ban treasure seekers from the Formby Point nature reserve for fear the search for the £25,000 ring would disturb the squirrels. The evidence of Coleen being in the squirrel sanctuary, let alone discarding the ring, is on the fictional side of flimsy.
Screenwriter turned playwright Helen Serafinowicz has the comic instinct to see how funny this is. She also has the imagination to take it one step further.
In The Legend of Rooney's Ring, she reframes an urban myth as a genuine myth. It is set in a netherworld halfway between the Brothers Grimm and JRR Tolkien, where a storybook princess known as C'leen (a sparky Emma Grace Arends) falls in love with a warrior by the unlikely name of Wayne (a brutish John May).
It looks as though the obstacle to their romance will be C'leen's regal parents, but the threat is much worse: entering with the menace of Darth Vader is an orange-faced Emperor Trump (a bullying Terry Mynott) who casts a spell on Wayne. For as long as the warrior possesses the ring, he will be irresistible to women. His fate, as the play has it, is to be a fanny magnet.
Delivered with the kind of pantomime panache for which this theatre is famed, Stephen Fletcher's production is a brassy mix of broad-brushstroke confrontations and lively pop songs (some more pertinent than others). But pantomimes are sustained by archetypal forces of good and evil, without which the silliness becomes tiresome.
That is what happens here: the Rooney's relationship is too shallow to care about and Emperor Trump's real-life counterpart is far more a threat than this cartoonish dolt and his desire to make Liverpool great again. After an opening scene in which wild-haired peasants hunt for the ring, Serafinowicz veers off the thing that made this story funny in the first place. Instead, she turns a promising idea into a two-hour Crackerjack sketch.
At Royal Court, Liverpool, until 23 August.